At the Paris Salon of 1893, the public was
astonished to discover a scrawny, old female nude tangled in her
long hair: Camille Claudel’s Clotho.

In the master’s studio, three sculptors bluntly took up the
theme of physical old age in women (specifically, osteology: the
study of bone formation). First, Rodin created The Helmet-Maker’s
Beautiful Wife, completed in 1889. His collaborator Jules Desbois
was working on Misery at almost the same time. Then, Claudel
executed Clotho. A comparison of the three works shows
how, in the same studio, new ideas take form and evolve differently,
according to the individual viewpoints of the artists. “The
only ugliness in art is that which has no character,” Rodin
said. In these works, Rodin and his studio broke with the nineteenth-century
tradition of portraying idealized subjects.

Rodin unflinchingly observed the aged body. Desbois showed the nude
old woman in an attitude of shamed propriety, letting the last tattered
rags of poverty fall away. Claudel created a hallucinatory allegory
of Fate holding the thread of Life.

By 1893, Claudel and Rodin were no longer working
together or seeing each other. Frightened off by the younger woman’s
demands for commitment, Rodin kept his distance. He went to live
in the country with Rose Beuret, his longtime companion since the
1860s. Claudel saw her dreams of marriage to Rodin collapse.

Steadfastly loyal, Rodin continued to approach collectors, journalists,
and government officials to recommend Claudel’s work to them.
Unfortunately, Rodin’s protection and artistic popularity
cast a shadow over his student, who was constantly compared with
him. Feeling humiliated and jealous, Claudel sought revenge and
did everything she could to distance herself from Rodin and establish
her own artistic identity.

The Age of Maturity is an allegory of Man abandoning Youth
and letting himself be carried off by Death. One can read Claudel’s
masterpiece as an eternal triangle in which the man is Rodin; the
pleading young woman, Camille; and the aged woman, Rose Beuret.
Both as an autobiographical work and a timeless allegory, The
Age of Maturity is a painful account of the break between Claudel
and Rodin.

In 1891, the Société de gens
de lettres (Society of Lettered Gentlemen) commissioned Rodin to
make a monument to renowned author Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850).
The sculptor launched into the project enthusiastically and did
extensive research on the writer. After seven years of work, he
was frustrated because of his contemporaries’ lack of understanding
of his new artistic aims for this monument. Neither the organization
that commissioned the work nor the public understood the spare sculpture
Rodin presented at the Paris Salon in 1898.

“This work that has been laughed at,” Rodin asserted,
“that people have made a point of scorning because they could
not destroy it, is the result of my whole life, the very pivot of
my aesthetic.”

Claudel, however, saw it as a “very great and very beautiful”
statue. She thus joined with a forward-thinking audience, a small
group of enlightened supporters, capable of recognizing the revolutionary
character of Rodin’s Balzac.

After their relationship ended, Camille Claudel’s
face continued to haunt Rodin. Starting in 1895, he returned to
portraits he had made of her early in their relationship.

Reusing his portraits of Claudel from the early 1880s, Rodin added
unexpected headdresses, drapery, and bases. He conceived some of
his most intimate portraits as evolving from the large, unfinished
marble or plaster block. Sometimes he incorporated hands from other
figures. The resulting compositions were molded and, in some cases,
produced in bronze and marble. Rodin experimented with subtle adjustments
until the final result satisfied him fully.

Thus, Claudel’s deeply moving face was nostalgically revived
and sublimated in an admirable series of symbolic portraits: The
Farewell, The Convalescent, France, Thought, and Aurora.
Except for France, these are personal works that the artist seldom
exhibited during his lifetime.